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inmates' suffering-was what the actual survivors had to endure and
accounts for their abiding guilt.
It
seems certain that the orphan Yolek will not be remembered; for
him, no one will survive to recite
Kaddish-the
prayer for the dead. This
is the implication of "unuttered name." But in keeping with the para–
doxical nature of the poem, this is not the case. Though Yolek's name is
unuttered, already in the second-to-Iast stanza he has become
omnipresent: "Wherever you are, Yolek will be there too"-providing
us with a presentiment of his final status. It is Yolek's utter absence that
is about to become a supreme presence. Perhaps
the
supreme presence,
for it should be noted that in Judaism one may only speak the substitute
names for God-His actual name must remain "unuttered."
The last stanza, the tercet, begins with an injunction typically
reserved for royalty-"Prepare to receive him.... " Just as soldiers
interrupted Yolek's meal, so he, in keeping with the poem's reversals and
ironies, will interrupt ours-but for a very different purpose. In litera–
ture, ghosts often appear because we have done them an injustice: Pal–
inurus returns to remind Aeneas that his body was left unburied; the
ghost of murdered Banquo appears to Macbeth as the usurper sits down
to a meal. Hecht's poem has a religious theme, indicated by the biblical
nature of the title, and Yolek's reappearance leads us to the Gospels .
To understand why, we must deal with the poem's epigraph. It is
taken from the Gospel of John
(19:7).
The Jews made this response to
Pontius Pilate concerning the fate of Jesus and this is an obvious refer–
ence to the blame they have had to endure for their supposed involve–
ment in the Crucifixion. Hecht's decision to quote from Luther's
translation is intended to remind German Christians of their complicity
in the Holocaust. In another segment from his conversation with Philip
Hoy, Hecht states:
It
is the Vatican's dubious position that German anti-Semitism as it
was exhibited under the Nazis "had its roots outside Christianity,"
and that the people who ran the camps were essentially pagan. This,
however, fails to agree with the Nazis' own view of the matter.
Hecht then refers to Peter Matheson's documentary account,
The
Third Reich and the Christian Churches,
which cites a German report
of
1944,
claiming that only 3.5 percent of Germans were self-declared
"neo-pagans." The inference is that whether lapsed or practicing, most
perpetrators of the Holocaust thought themselves Christian. In "The
Book of Yolek," Hecht is continuing the argument made by several
postwar Christian theologians, including Rosemary Reuther
(Faith and
